K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Life at 2.6Ghz

I’ll apologize up front for not posting anything new in the past few days; I’m still sorting out my added job responsibilities, and that means they take up a little extra time. I’m hoping that in the next month or so they are streamlined enough that they don’t preoccupy me so. I do favor efficiency. :)

I’m still waiting on parts replacements for the Sony PCG-GRT100 that I am supposedly “repairing” for a friend; whenever parts are ordered and receieved, fixing it will probably take about 10 minutes. (Provided the inverter is the problem, of course.) However, this is obviously not a very important issue for the owner, and so I’ve taken it upon myself to drag it out of the closet and experiment upon it.

Like I mentioned elsewhere, it’s a nice machine, quite fast but with an underpowered graphics card. The network connection gave me a little turn yesterday; I’d never worked with an SIS900-chipset connection, and ended up relying on Ubuntu to track down the module that was in use for it. The wireless card, oddly enough, appears to be Prism-based, so both connections are easily configured and set up from the command line.

Which is where I am with it, right now. I was curious to see what kind of speed could be milked from it, considering it runs at more than two-and-a-half times as fast as my Inspiron. I installed Crux (all of this with an exceptionally dim LCD panel) and did the system updates in less than two hours — recompiling almost everything in core usually takes about six on the 1Ghz machine. (gcc takes a very long time.)

I’m putting xorg and Openbox on it next, and perhaps the proprietary Nvidia driver. I have a feeling they’ll all be quite spunky, but that’s no guarantee that the machine will turn out to be a true speed demon. I want to make sure 2.6.25.10 can be carved down enough to perform at least as fast, if not faster, than the Pentium III machines I usually run.

Of course, working with this machine reminds me that I have a fully functional Thinkpad that also just needs a video solution, which means I have two “blind” machines that would be otherwise usable if I would just break down and buy an external monitor. Hmm. Perhaps I should add that to my to-do list. …